Chris Brown, Police Violence, Macbeth, and More

• With the power outage, I have not been able to read a couple of things I had marked a few weeks ago, like this interview with Lee Gutkind about narrative medicine.  CNF may be offering an online course in it next year.  That could be interesting.  I do wonder, though, if we are starting to create a false category with "narrative medicine" since so much can go under it.  But you can get an MA in it.
• This tweet from Elon James White is fantastic.  After years of unarmed black men sometimes being not just shot but killed by police, it seems especially poignant.  Now white people are experiencing something that has become normal for so many.
• Chris Brown will never get it.  He thinks that his beating of Rhianna should never be mentioned again.  As I wrote over at Vulture, "If Jane Fonda can still get called Hanoi Jane by some people for things she did thirty years ago that were not crimes, Chris Brown needs to accept that this will follow him for the rest of his life, especially since it's a felony, and those are supposed to follow you the rest of your life. It's why you have to report all felony convictions whenever you apply for anything like a job or passport. Don't plead guilty to a crime if you can't do that time. And for felonies, that time is, in some form, forever."  These outbursts of his (like the one a few months ago after Good Morning America) signal that he may just lose it sometime and assault a reporter or someone else, and then it'll be real jail time.  But he can get help; he just has to get it now.
• Several people pointed me to this article about how female comedians can supposedly get away with things male comedians cannot, like joking about rape.  I didn't leave a comment over there, but I almost asked why women who have never been raped have a greater chance of getting away with joking about rape than a man who has been raped.
• I (barely) got tickets to see Sleep No More my last night in NYC.  I really can't wait.  I always feel like I miss the big stuff, but I won't be missing this one.  Since there's no dialogue, I think I need to reread Macbeth for the first time in over twenty years so I can catch how the movement, costumes, and set design are telling the story.  Supposedly, every line of the play is embedded somewhere (and the play is free on Amazon).

Tweeting, Barebacking, and More

• Thanks to William Bradley for the link to an article about a man who tweeted the argument he was forced to overhear at a Burger King in Boston.  The article's author argues that the argument should not have been made public on Twitter, and many of those who left comments agree.  I disagree, though there are too many reasons to get into why.  I just don't get why people are shocked when things done in public are made public.  Since the Rodney King beating, we know that cameras and recoding devices are everywhere, and that was before we were even talking about social media.  It's funny that so many are upset that this was made public on Twitter, but if this fight had led to the murder or assault of one member of the couple by the other, he'd be a hero for documenting what led to the crime.  We can't have it both ways.
• I love how the last paragraph of this article about some of the problems that have occurred at various occupy sites puts sexual assaults at the same level as peeing in a bottle.  We were in the middle of the power outage when a women's only tent was created at Occupy Wall Street because some women felt the park wasn't safe, so I don't know if anyone has been talking about that or if it has been kept quiet so representation of the movement stays entirely positive.
• John Hodgins tweeted a link to this great article on happiness.  It's a lot of common sense, but it's also concise, clear, and something I think I should read daily.
• I was really happy to see such an extensive article about sex parties and barebacking in SF Weekly, but I did feel compelled to leave this comment at the site: "As someone who has been around and having sex since the 80s, who lost my first husband to AIDS as well as numerous friends, I really can't believe we're still having this discussion. People were having sex without condoms way before any porn company had videos showing it, way before barebacking was a word, and way before we had even a tenth of the drugs we have now to combat HIV. If you condemn the practice, it will not disappear. It will just go further underground. Shaming people about their sexual practices (when it's consenting adults with consenting adults) will lead to nothing but more pain, death, and conflict. Lots and lots of people have sex with condoms. Lots of lots of people do not. I'd rather have conversations than point fingers and say the government should step in and do something to 'those people.'"  I've left other comments, too, in response to what some people have said to me, but it's all the same kind of conversation we all usually have on this subject, and that's sad, really.

International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, as I mentioned yesterday. Obviously, it's hit me particularly hard this year. This day was chosen because it's the day that the Mirabal sisters were killed in the Dominican Republic after an order was handed down by the country's dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Their story is fictionalized in the novel In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, which I have taught several times over the years.

But it's not just a day to protest rape and murder. It's a day to stand up for violence in all its guises. It's a day not just to stop telling misogynistic jokes but to stop allowing them to be told in your presence. It's a day to stand up against criticism and judgment and blame. It's one thing to say you're against militarized rapes in other countries, but it's quite another to confront the women and men in our daily lives who contribute to misogyny and patriarchy. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that I handle such confrontation easily, but we should at least be aware of the roles we all play in allowing violence against women to take place in our backyards and around the world.

Women are dying, and it's not just in the abstract.

Random Thoughts Too Long for Twitter

*Martina Navratilova is a freaking idiot for likening Andre Agassi's use of crystal meth with Roger Clemens' (alleged) use of steroids. Meth is not exactly something that will help someone win a Grand Slam tennis tournament. I get that it's the lying about it that she says is the problem, but the connection to Clemens just seems more idiotic the more I think about it.

*Joe Lieberman. The less said the better. Okay, that wasn't too long for Twitter, but I already complained about him over there enough this week.

*Chris Murphy rocks. He's our representative to the US House. Not only did he vote for the health care plan, but in the email he sent to constiuents about his vote, he describes how he was supposed to talk about it on Fox News, but "the producers at Fox News couldn’t get their act together." He's got my vote next year again and will probably get some of my money.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

Yep, what happened in Maine sucks. It's one thing not to give a group of people rights. It's another thing to take away rights that a group has. But, whatever, been there, done that.

Instead, I'm rather excited that the federal government is lifting the ban on HIV+ people traveling into the United States. That makes me really happy because it changes the potential for my research. There have been time I've been at conferences and had to listen to speakers from other countries say they had to lie about their health to get into the country to speak, and there have been plenty of other times when I've been to conferences and someone was not able to attend because they didn't want to lie, and they knew it would be illegal for them to enter this country. That means I lose a chance to learn from some pretty great people.

This also means that the International AIDS Conference can be held in the United States! I'm not saying I'll be able to attend, but the chance of attending increases when it's actually in this country. And the travel ban was the number one reason why it hasn't been in this country in recent years. After all, if it's illegal for half the presenters and attendees to show up, why have it here? And I just made up that number; I don't know how many attend who are HIV+, but a lot do.

The potential of lifting the ban is really exciting.

The Existence of Homophobia

Some readers may have seen my comments on a post at Prof. Hacker about making student evaluations of our teaching public. I've received a couple of private comments about what I had to say over there, mainly from people surprised at some of the things I said. Basically, I posted some cautionary comments, and I admit that I kinda went all over the place with those comments. As part of my administrative job, I read hundreds of student evaluations each semester, and I have seen some very, very disturbing comments. I have seen a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and the like over and over again.

As we all know, in spaces that allow for anonymity, we can easily encounter people that throw around things like the N-word (which I refuse to type or say). I have been called a fag more than once on my own evaluations. Interestingly, in my case, the use of such words has not always coincided with low numbers or other negative comments. In fact, they often come with perfect scores and other positive comments. For example, there was the student who called me one of the best professors she or he had ever had, giving me the highest rankings on the quantitative side, but my being a fag still creeped him or her out.

As I mentioned over there (perhaps unclearly), the thought of posting such evaluations online disturbs me for various reasons. One of those reasons is that I just don't want to be reminded again and again of how often I have to deal with homophobia in my daily life. And that is where the private comments I received came from. People who keep up with my blog and other online presences have been surprised to find out that homophobia is a part of my life because I never talk about it.

Quite frankly, I never talk about it because it hurts. Also, I often get the feeling the people don't believe me. It's kind of like Elaine Scarry's argument that those who feel physical pain are certain they are in pain while those around them often doubt if the pain is as bad as it sounds. If I talk about encountering a moment of homophbia, I often get a "Really?", as though people aren't sure it was as bad as I described.

See, here's something I have never said on the blog but that I have said in private conversations. I have encountered more moments of homophobia since I moved to New England than I ever did living in the south or the midwest. There may be lots of reasons for this, including the times of living in each place and other individual elements of life in these various places. But people have told me that I must be so happy to live in a place that is so gay friendly. We have gay marriage here! We have anti-discrimination laws! We have all this stuff that other people are fighting for, and we do have those things. But that does not mean homophobia is gone.

In fact, I sometimes wonder if the reason why Da Man and I have had difficult times here is because the larger political climate is gay friendly, so those who disagree with that ideology feel pushed to do things that reflect their homophobic thinking. Now I am not arguing at all that I wish those laws were gone or that activism should end. No, no, no! I am just trying to get people to acknowledge that remnants of homophobia that exist, much like the racism that still exists after Obama's election. On one level, there have been major changes. And on other levels, people are pissed and fighting against those changes. And some of us encounter that anger more easily than others.

Over on that post at Prof. Hacker, I felt like I did a brain dump of lots and lots of ideas, allowing important points to get clouded. I mixed up the idea of inappropriate and personal comments with comments that reflect damaging ideologies like racism, sexism, and homophobia. I do think there is a difference. Perhaps that difference is subtle. How do we know that comments about a straight, white man's clothes or body shape are truly an individual attack and not a reflection of an ideology? And how do we know that the same comments about an African-American lesbian are not a reflection of such ideologies and are truly a personal attack? In the continuing discussion about posting student evaluations online, those will be topics that have to be addressed if not answered.

My point in this entry is simply that many of us encounter general moments of hatred regularly even if we don't talk about it. Now, many might say I should talk about it. I should mention each and every instance on this blog and get it out there. I should confront it head on. And there's a lot of truth to that. But sometimes that confrontation is just exhausting. I do sometimes confront people directly. I sometimes don't. I sometimes process it in my paper journal. I sometimes try to let it go. I sometimes wallow in the pain and feel it deeply. And I sometimes try to shove it aside and ignore it so I can stop feeling the pain.

Having been keeping a blog or online journal for over ten years now, I often get comments from people who say they admire me for writing about myself and my life so publicly, and I appreciate those comments so much. Maybe I haven't been fair by not talking about everything, by not creating a complete picture of my life. Yes, such completeness is impossible, but some might see not talking about such things as a gap that should not be here. I'm sorry for that.

And it's not like it never appears on the blog. I've certainly gotten public comments that I am wrong to be living my life as I have been living it, though I don't think I've gotten any of those on this blog, yet. And I have not let the homophobia stop me from living the life I want to live. Some may say my lack of discussion shows I'm hiding, but I disagree. I don't think of myself as someone who hides who I am from the world.

Even if none of the women you know talk about sexism, it doesn't mean they don't encounter it regularly. Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. And take all the other damaging ideologies and do the same thing. Not all marginalized people encounter hatred, but many do. It's a part of just about every aspect of our world. There might be people who get away from it, but a lot of us don't.

Eve Sedgwick Says What I Think

There are many reasons why I consider synchronicity to be one of the key driving forces of my life.

This afternoon, I was sitting on the couch with the window open behind me, reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, which I started last week after learning about Sedgwick's death. It's been on my shelf for years with a lot of other things I've barely touched. I was reading along and found the following paragraph in the first few pages of chapter three:

And to attend, as we have been here, to the spatialized role of witness in constituting the relational vicinity of the speech act: where does that get us but to the topic of marriage itself as theater -- marriage as a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world (a heterosexual couple secure in their right to hold hands in the street), continually reorienting around itself the surrounding relations of visibility and spectatorship, of the tacit and the explicit, of the possibility or impossibility of a given person's articulating a given enunciatory position? Marriage isn't always hell, but it is true that le mariage, c'est les autres: like a play, marriage exists in and for the eyes of others. One of the most ineradicable folk beliefs of the married seems to be that it is no matter-of-fact thing, but rather a great privilege for anyone else to behold a wedding or a married couple or to be privy to their secrets -- including oppressive or abusive secrets, the portable puppet theater of Punch and Judy, but also the showy open secret of the "happy marriage." Like the most conventional definition of a play, marriage is constituted as a spectacle that denies its audience the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it. (72)

It immediately clicked with me for a lot of reasons. I have said many times before that I believe legal rights should be extended to all couples, but I question why society has to privilege marriage over so many other types of bonds and relationships. My reasons align with those offered by BeyondMarriage.Org, and I don't intend to delve into them here and now. But I read that paragraph from Sedgwick and felt the chill of recognition. It gets at why marriage can squick me out so much.

Soon after, Da Man arrived home. Before I even saw him, before he turned the corner into the living room, he asked, "Did you really want to get married this year?" We had our civil union in 2005 so we would get the legal benefits associated with marriage, but we did the bare minimum to make it happen. We went to a Justice of the Peace, and no one else was present but the three of us. If we could have signed the form without having to speak any words in front of power as embodied in the JP, we would have done that. And when the state supreme court said that the state had to start offeirng marriage and not just civil unions, we decided to get married so that our legal benefits could extend outside the state to other states that recognize gay marriages, just in case.

But back to tonight. Da Man asked, "Did you really want to get married this year?" I didn't think he was proposing that we break up since that would be the stupidest thing he could ever do (and vice versa). I just looked at him after he turned the corner. He continued, "I heard on the radio that the state is converting all civil unions to marriage next year." And that does turn out to be true. We knew the vote on the bill was happening in the state house and senate this week, but we didn't really know the details.

I won't recap the conversation that we had, but we decided quickly not to get married on our anniversary this year as we'd originally planned, and it's largely for the reasons Sedgwick discusses in the paragraph above. We don't want to do anything publicly. To the extent possible, we want to keep our relationship out of the panoptic arena, away from the eyes of witnesses. I then asked, "If we don't get married in a ceremony, should we still get rings?" Basically, we're going to put the money elsewhere. Unless something changes, we'll just wait for our civil union to convert.

And we'll be married when we wake up on October 1, 2010.

Do Something About It

Longtime readers know I tend to stay away from overtly political discussions on this blog. I do so for many reasons, including the fact that politics gets reduced to binaries of being for or against something that it's so difficult to explore a position on a topic. In other words, I have to know firmly what I think before I say it because my opinion will be judged. Often, in overtly political discussions, we are not allowed to examine perspectives. We are just supposed to have one.

But I was glad to learn of this article in LAist that explores the passage of Proposition 8 in California last week, which bans gay marriage. Since the passage of Proposition 8, there has been much outrage in gay communities, and this article ponders what might have happened if these protests had taken place before the election. In other words, where were the energy and activism before the election? There were signs and bumper stickers, but where were the marches that people are calling for now? It's a pet peeve of mine that people say they want change but don't do much about it but send money and put on a bumper sticker.

Like a lot of people, I'm against gay marriage because I'm against marriage in general. My views align most closely with those of Beyond Marriage; there are lots of other viewpoints on this side of the issue online elsewhere, too. Yes, as long as marriage is allowed for some, I think it should be allowed for all. And Da Man and I plan to marry on a certain date next year since it's now legal in CT (we had a civil union in 2005, but marriage is now allowed). But, in general, I question why we privilege some relationships over others as a society.

I probably won't ever march for gay marriage because of my personal feelings about it. Yes, I'll take advantage of the rights marriage offers, and my voting will always line up in support of marriage equality. But I can't help but wonder what might have happened in CA if those who really, really wanted gay marriage to happen had really gotten out and done something, if there had been the same collective action on the against side as there had been on the for side. Frankly, I think Proposition 8 would have fallen easily.

And this is part of my larger annoyance about local politics in general, the way that we wait for someone else to do it. Am I just as complicit in that? At times, yes. I do volunteer for area nonprofits now and then to do grantwriting and lead workshops. I've written annual reports and press releases. Have I done enough? That's for each person to answer on her or his own after defining "enough."

But I do think that, if people want things to happen, they have to do something about it.